The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate

by Jacqueline Kelly

  In conclusion, it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.… But I have too deeply enjoyed the voyage, not to recommend any naturalist, although he must not expect to be so fortunate in his companions as I have been, to take all chances, and to start, on travels by land if possible, if otherwise, on a long voyage.

  DR. PRITZKER was at first rather skeptical about typed labels, but after I ran up a batch to show him, he changed his mind.

  “That looks very professional, Calpurnia. You’re hired. I’ll pay you a penny apiece.”

  Now, this may not sound like a lot of money, but Dr. Pritzker, being the only vet for miles around, was in much demand and prescribed at least a dozen drenches and salves and powders every day, all requiring a label. I calculated on the spot that I could make at least fifty cents per week!

  “Yessir!” I said, and stuck out my hand. We shook on our deal, which for some reason amused him.

  I got better and better on the type-writer, and made fewer and fewer mistakes, and made more and more money. But now I had to face the problem of the machine being at home, when I really needed it at Dr. Pritzker’s office. I had worked out a system in which I would run to his office the moment school let out, run home and type up the labels he needed, and then run them back. All this running back and forth was proving tiresome. But what to do? Buying a machine was out of the question as they were prohibitively expensive. But maybe I could … rent one.

  I waited until Aggie had received another letter from The Lump and was in a good mood. I found her propped up on the bed, darning a sock.

  “Say, Aggie, I was wondering…”

  “Wondering what?”

  “It’s about your machine.”

  She looked up sharply. “You haven’t damaged it, have you? I’ll wring your neck if you have.”

  “No—ha-ha—nothing like that.” With Aggie, the term “good mood” was a relative one.

  “And you are still using your own ribbon, right? Don’t you dare use mine.”

  “I’m not,” I said, offended that she thought I’d reneged on our deal.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I’m typing labels for Dr. Pritzker … and I thought … since you’re not using it … I wondered if I could take it to his office and use it there.”

  She laughed. “Not a chance.”

  “You know I’d take good care of it. No one else would touch it.”

  “Forget it.” She returned her attention to the darning egg.

  I played my next card, the one I knew would get her attention. “I’ll pay you.”

  She looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll rent it from you. So I can take it to his office.”

  “How much?”

  “I’ll give you ten percent of what I make from typing.”

  She said, “I’ll do it for fifty percent but you better not put a scratch on it.”

  “No. That’s too much.”

  We haggled away and eventually settled on twenty percent, with my having to give her an accounting and her rental money every week. Why she would bother to dicker over such trifling sums when she was making good money of her own, I didn’t stop to wonder. I guess I figured that when you’d lost everything in the world, it only made sense that your days would revolve around money. I carefully loaded the Underwood into its case and dragged it to the office in J.B.’s wagon. Dr. Pritzker made a space for it on the corner of his desk.

  The next time I typed a letter for Granddaddy, I got his permission to show it to Dr. Pritzker before mailing it.

  Well, Dr. Pritzker was mighty impressed with that and asked me to type out his letters and bills for him as well as labels. My afternoons were filled with such dispatches as “Enclosed please find the bill for services rendered re: gelding Snowflake” or, if someone had not paid on time, “Your bill for treatment re: heifer Buttercup is now overdue. Please remit.”

  The truth is that the typing got sort of monotonous after a while, but making money of my own and occasionally getting to watch Dr. Pritzker when an animal was brought in was more than exciting enough to make up for it.

  And then poor Samuel got an infection in his foot from being trod upon by a recalcitrant bull and was ordered by Dr. Walker to stay in bed with the limb strictly elevated above heart level for a full week. I immediately volunteered to go with Dr. Pritzker on his farm calls.

  He looked dubious and said, “What about Travis? You don’t think he’d like to go instead?”

  “Uh, he’s in bed too. With, uh, the croup. Otherwise, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to help.” I couldn’t bring myself to spill the beans that my brother fainted at the thought of blood, much less the sight of it.

  So I raced to the office after school to help the doctor load up his supplies. And although the blacksmith had adapted the harness and reins for Dr. Pritzker so that he could drive with one hand, he still required help hitching his buckskin, Penny, to the buggy. You might think that a veterinarian would have the most attractive horse in town, but not so. With her narrow chest and sickle hocks, Penny’s conformation was not the best, but she was otherwise healthy and calm, and he’d got her for a good price.

  “Appearances aren’t everything,” he said, and I, in sympathy with Penny, chimed in with, “Of course not.”

  The first few days I rode with him in the buggy, we got some odd looks mixed in with the smiles and waves, but I sat up straight and did my best imitation of a real veterinarian’s assistant. When we got to the farms, I fetched a bucket of water and handed him his soap and towel while he consulted with the farmer regarding the animals’ complaints. Frequently the farmer would make such unhelpful statements as “he’s not himself” or “she’s off her feed,” comments so useless that I wondered how Dr. Pritzker could ever make a diagnosis from such vague information. Nevertheless, with close questioning and a careful physical examination, he would elicit the facts he required while I handed him his instruments and took notes for the “patient’s” file.

  The high point came when we called at the Dawsons’ ranch and found a cow lying on her chest in a stall. Tied to her tail was a note scrawled in pencil: Belly all swole. Plees fix.

  Mr. Dawson and his sons were out branding and there was no one to help. Except me.

  The poor cow looked miserable, drooling and moaning with each breath, her left side grossly distended. We did our usual routine with bucket and soap and water, and I opened the cloth roll of instruments while he performed an exam.

  By now I had trained him into teaching me what he was doing. He said, “See here on the left, there’s an impaction of the rumen, or first stomach. I shall have to anesthetize her to clear the blockage. We’ll have to wait until the Dawsons get back.”

  Stoutly I declared, “I can do it. It’s one ounce of alcohol plus two ounces of chloroform plus three ounces of ether. Shake well before using.”

  He looked at me doubtfully. “You’ve been a big help to me, Callie, but really—”

  “You have to watch the respirations carefully,” I said, doing my best to sound confident and knowledgeable. “Too little, and the cow will thrash. Too much, and the cow will die. Right?”

  “That’s right. But you could get hurt. And what on earth would your parents say?”

  Well, I had a pretty good idea what they’d say but I wasn’t going into it right then, and before he could think of any other protests, I was removing the corks from the pungent chemicals. I mixed them together in a clean bottle and shook it well.

  I took out the anesthesia cone and said, “Ready, Doctor,” in my best professional voice.

  He looked tense and muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like, “God, don’t let me regret this.”

  I tied the cow’s halter rope short and pushed the blotting-paper cone over her muzzle. She was too ill to protest. I began to dribble the chemical mixture onto the cone. As she inhaled it, her eyelids drooped even further, a
nd she finally dropped her head to the straw. I flicked her eyelid as I’d seen Dr. Pritzker do, and she did not blink. Now the trick was to keep dripping the mixture at a steady rate to keep her under while he worked. But not so far under that she wouldn’t wake up.

  “Very good,” he said, looking a bit more relaxed.

  He picked up the trocar, a thin tube with a sharp pointed end, saying, “We’ll try this first. Maybe this will clear her.”

  Whoever believes the practice of surgery to be a delicate matter would have been shocked by what happened next. He plunged the instrument with great force straight through the cow’s side into her distended stomach, releasing a great whoosh of gas into the stall, followed by a jet of semiliquid grass. The liquid drained for a few seconds and then dribbled to a stop.

  “Damn,” Dr. Pritzker said, and I was ridiculously proud of the fact that he forgot the need to apologize for saying such a bad word in my presence. I was no longer a mere girl—I was his working assistant. “The trocar’s clogged. We’ll have to open her up. Bistoury.”

  I handed him the long curved knife. He made a small incision in the skin behind the last rib and then pushed down hard on the knife, enlarging the incision to six inches, then made a stitch between the skin and the lower part of the stomach. He stuck his whole hand inside the cow’s stomach and started pulling out huge handfuls of muck. You could see the distention slowly subside the more he extracted.

  “What has this old girl been up to?” he said. “I’ve never seen one quite this bad before.” When he pronounced himself satisfied, he sewed up the stomach and then the skin.

  “All right,” he said, “time to bring her up.”

  I stopped dribbling the anesthetic but kept the cone in place in case she started to thrash. She slowly regained consciousness and, at the end of it all, hauled herself to her feet and looked around with a renewed interest in life. Saved!

  I reeked of chemicals and had a smudge of manure on my pinafore but was otherwise unscathed.

  Dr. Pritzker said, “Well done, Calpurnia. You have a real talent for this.” Then he looked a little furtive and said, “But, uh, we don’t need to tell your mother or father about today, do we?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Oh, good. That’s good.”

  This time we both washed up in the bucket and shared the soap and towel. I couldn’t stop grinning for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER 24

  DOGS, LUCKY AND NOT

  These wolves are well known, from Byron’s account of their tameness and curiosity, which the sailors, who ran into the water to avoid them, mistook for fierceness.… They have been observed to enter a tent, and actually pull some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman.

  UPON HEARING THAT ANOTHER dog disaster soon followed in our lives, you would naturally assume that it involved the coydog at the dam, but not so. It involved Father’s prize bird dog, Ajax, along with Homer, one of the Outside Dogs. Apparently they had chanced upon a rattlesnake den in the scrub. I always figured that was why deadly creatures like rattlesnakes possessed rattles—to prevent this exact kind of ruination—but the dogs imprudently decided to investigate, probably egging each other on, and barely made it home before collapsing on the front porch. Fang marks in stark evidence on their muzzles and forepaws told the sad story. Father was at the gin when it happened. Sul Ross ran to fetch him and then ran to find Dr. Pritzker. By the time they arrived, both dogs’ faces were terribly swollen, almost beyond recognition. Ajax gasped for breath, a horrible rasping noise; Homer whimpered in pain.

  Dr. Pritzker bent low over first Ajax and then Homer. I could tell from his expression that there was nothing to be done. “I’m sorry, Alfred,” he said to my father. “I’m afraid I can’t help them.”

  Father looked more upset than I had ever seen him. The dogs, especially Ajax, had been his faithful companions for years, keeping him patient company in the cold autumn hours before dawn, huddled together for warmth in the blind, waiting for the call of the geese overhead. They had built a powerful bond between them, Ajax and Father.

  Samuel fetched Dr. Pritzker’s old revolver from the buggy and loaded it with two cartridges.

  My father found his voice and said, “I … I suppose I should do it.”

  “No, Alfred,” Dr. Pritzker said. “I hope you will allow me to do it. You take these children and go inside.”

  Father hadn’t noticed that Sul Ross and I had been joined on the lawn by Harry and Lamar.

  Father said to us, “Go inside, all of you.” He nodded at Dr. Pritzker and followed us into the house, where he went straight to the sideboard and poured himself a glass of whiskey. The first shot rang out, and I flinched. Father gulped the drink down in one long swallow. I had never before seen him drink spirits in the middle of the day. The second shot rang out. He left the room without a word. We heard him trudge up the stairs, one slow, heavy step at a time.

  I stood at the window and watched Samuel wrap each of the limp burdens in a gunnysack and carry it to the buggy. I was beyond grateful that Travis wasn’t there. I hoped he was down at the river with his coydog.

  When he returned home that evening, I don’t remember who told him the news. I only know it wasn’t me.

  Father remained subdued for days. And then Dr. Pritzker came for dinner one night and casually—very casually—let drop that Ollie Croucher’s retriever Priscilla had whelped six fine pups, all healthy, not a runt in the bunch, and they would be weaned and ready to go in a few days. The doctor said, “I’m thinking of taking one myself.”

  J.B. piped up with, “Ooh, puppies. Can we get one?”

  Mother said, “I don’t see why not.” She smiled encouragingly at J.B. and then at Father and then at Travis, saying, “I’d bet you’d like that too, wouldn’t you? We could go and look at them on Saturday. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  J.B. agreed that it would be fun; Father smiled wanly and said that he thought it a good idea; Travis only tucked into his dinner, oddly silent. I tried to catch his eye, but he would not look at me. His not looking at me spoke volumes.

  Just as I expected, he motioned me out to the front porch after dinner. He whispered frantically, “I need your help, Callie, I need your help to bring Scruffy home. It’s the perfect time for a new dog, even Mother said so.”

  “I know, but she was referring to a purebred hunting dog.”

  “Scruffy can hunt. He’s been hunting chickens all his life.”

  “You mustn’t tell a soul about that—it’s part of the problem.”

  “Will you help us? Will you stick up for him?” My little brother was so filled with anxiety I thought he might burst. “You could tell them he’s not a crazy wild animal. You could tell them he’d make a good pet for us.”

  “Okay, I’ll do what I can for you and for Scruffy. But, Travis, haven’t you noticed? It’s not like I have a whole lot of say in what goes on around here.”

  He visibly relaxed. “Thanks, Callie. We’ll go see him tomorrow. We’ll make a plan together.”

  We went back inside to get ready for bed. Travis might have slept well that night but he had managed to transfer some of his anxiety to me. I lay in the dark, scheming about how to convince our parents to adopt Scruffy.

  The next day found me following Travis along a deer trail, or perhaps a coydog trail, through the thick undergrowth downstream from the gin. Scruffy came out of the bushes, glad to see us. He had filled out nicely, and his coat was glossy. Travis had even put a collar on him.

  “See?” said Travis proudly. “Doesn’t he look good?”

  “Well, he does look a whole lot better,” I admitted.

  “He is kind of a working dog, you know. He caught a rat the other day. Will you take a look at these sore spots on his flank? I’ve been washing them with soap and water, but they still won’t heal over.” Travis grasped his collar. “Good boy, Scruffy. You’ll be all right.”

  I looked at one of the open wounds and gently separated the edges with m
y fingers. Scruffy whined a little but that was all. The wound itself was not wide but looked chronic. I wished I had one of Dr. Pritzker’s probes with me to check on its depth. I patted Scruffy, and he licked my hand again, bearing me no grudge for causing him discomfort. A good dog.

  Travis said, “It doesn’t look very big, so why doesn’t it heal?”

  “It’s not very big at the surface but I think it’s deep. There’s something down in there that’s stopping it from healing, probably a shotgun pellet.”

  He frowned. “Can you fix it?”

  “It’s an actual operation. First you have to dig out the foreign body that’s in there, then you have to scrape out the tract or cauterize it with a hot iron so the flesh heals properly.”

  “But can you do it?” he said anxiously.

  “I could give the anesthetic, but Dr. Pritzker would have to do the surgery,” I said.

  “So will you ask him? I bet if you ask him, he’ll do it. Tell him I can pay him out of my allowance. Mother will like Scruffy a lot better if he doesn’t have any sores.”

  “All right, I’ll talk to him about it.” I looked at Scruffy critically. “And after he’s healed, I think we should give him a bath with some of the fancy soap that Mother brings out when we have guests. That would improve him some too.”

  “That’s a great idea,” said Travis, grinning at me in admiration.

  “And I think we should trim some of that fur around his ruff. Maybe trim his tail so it’s not so bushy. I can do it with the scissors. That will neaten him up some.”

  “Okay, great!” Travis beamed his very best smile at me, the truly irresistible one, the one that caused friends and strangers alike to cave in to his entreaties, including the ones that inevitably led to trouble.

  “Then we could make a bow out of one of my hair ribbons,” I said, “to make him look cuter.” It was going to take a whole lot more than that, I thought, but I kept this to myself.

  “See?” Travis said, ruffling Scruffy’s fur. “He’s going to make a really good pet.”

  Travis crouched down and put his arms around Scruffy, leaning his head against the warm fur. They looked so happy together, the boy and his dog who, while not the best-looking dog in the world, made a really good pet. I hoped that Mother and Father could look past the pedigree and the appearance to see what I saw, that Travis had finally found the right pet.